Critique of Intelligent Design

The renowned expert in information theory, Professor Jeffrey Shallit demonstrates the abject ignorance of information theory displayed by S. Meyer of the Discovery Institute in his miserable pseudo-scientific opus titled Signature in the Cell that has been highly acclaimed by creationists of various hues.

Using a mostly theoretical approach, this article attacks the underlying assumptions and principles of Intelligent Design by questioning its entire "research" paradigm. Intelligent Design theorists argue that by analyzing a system, they can determine whether its natural structures are the
product of ID. Not only is this scientifically unfeasible, it also discourages further research in cases where natural phenomena have been attributed to intelligent agency. The latter portion of the article is a rejoinder to some criticisms made by an ID advocate who says he is a scientist. This rejoinder addresses some additional claims of ID proponents, and demonstrates their highly specious nature.

Professor PZ Myers demonstrates one more time how ID advocates misrepresent scientific data, trying to utilize them for their own goals. The case in point is a high-quality scientific article analyzing the process of the increase in size of life forms over the millennia; the authors of that paper found links between the organism's size increase and the evolution of the earth atmosphere's composition. ID advocates completely distort the paper's contents by asserting that its results allegedly point to the "front-loading" of the genetic information by a mythical "designer." In fact, the paper shows nothing of the sort.

Prominent mathematician Jeffrey Shallit suggests five questions regarding certain fundamental concepts of information theory, mainly in its Kolmogorov's version. He demonstrates that the intelligent design "theorists," including Dembski, have in the past made serious errors in discussing the notions encompassed by the five listed questions, thus manifesting a lack of understanding of the subjects they wanted to be parts of the so called "mathematical foundation of intelligent design."

This is one more, quite telltale, demonstration of the vacuity of the ID's proponents' pseudo-mathematics. Besides the text itself of Shallit's essay, the discussion on the Recursivity blog is also of interest.

Arguments based in probability and statistics in support of Intelligent Design have long been
presented by William Dembski. Recently, also Michael Behe have attempted to use such arguments, in
his book "The Edge of Evolution." We investigate some of the claims of Dembski and Behe and conclude
that, to anybody with sufficient expertise, they have no valid argument.

This is a continuation of the exchange of arguments between Fuller and Grayling. The response of Fuller to Grayling's review of Fuller's book is linked to in this post, which is Grayling's response to the former. (Off-site link.)

AC Grayling dissects the new book by the notorious "philosopher of science" Steve Fuller, where the latter unsuccessfully tries to prove the validity of intelligent design pseudo-science. (Off-site link.)

Intelligent Design advocates are fond of using the bacterial flagellum as, using Dembski's words, a "mascot" of the Intelligent Design movement. In particular, during the recent TV debate between Behe and Perakh, Behe showed pictures of flagella and triumphantly asserted that they looked exactly like man-made machines, and therefore they must be designed. What ID advocates, including Behe, fail to mention is that the images of flagella they endlessly demonstrate are heavily doctored, and that the real observed flagella do not look like "machines" at all. In fact, the structure of flagella is more typical of a bacteriophage virus. Seeing the actual cryogenic electron micrographs of flagella, as well as the images derived from X-rays analysis immediately reveals that showing artificial machine-like images of flagella, without explaining the degree of idealization applied, is sometimes perilously close to committing a fraud.

The authors of this statement constitute a group set up for the purpose by the Executive Committee of the International Society for Science and Religion. Through a process involving consultation with all members of the Society, the statement has now been accepted by the Executive Committee for publication as a statement made on behalf of the Society.

This post contains information about forced resignation of Chris Comer, director of science curriculum at the Texas Education Agency, as punishment for forwarding an email announcing a forthcoming lecture by Professor Barbara Forrest. Unlike the exaggerated and largely false stories about alleged persecution of intelligent design advocates by evil Darwinists, here is the real story about the expulsion of an official who committed no crime or any other unseemly deeds but just did not slavishly followed orders of her creationist supervisors. The Discovery Institutes's hypocrites, who are so loudly lamenting the alleged denial of free speech rights to their cohorts (like the astronomer Gonzalez of Iowa State University), now have an opportunity to prove their love of freedom of speech by speaking up in defense of Chris Comer. Of course, the prediction of their behavior is easy: they will no more stand up for Comer than the creators of the forthcoming movie "Expelled" will include this episode in their propagandistic concoction. (Off-site link.)

A few weeks ago, graduate student Abigail Smith, who maintains an excellent blog "ERV" (see http://endogenousretrovirus.blogspot.com/) posted a well-substantiated critique of Michael Behe's new book "The Edge of Evolution." Behe, as well as other ID advocates, disdainfully dismissed that critique. Behe stooped to supercilious remarks laced with sexism and resorted to an "argument" pointing to Abbie Smith being so low on the rung of authority that he, a scientist with a PhD degree and 35 scientific publications, has nothing but contempt for her critique.
At that point Dr. Ian Musgrave, an accomplished scientist highly knowledgeable in the matter, entered the fray, and showed in a series of "Open Letters" to Behe that Abbie Smith was right and Behe's counter-arguments lacked substance. Musgrave's letters (all posted to the Panda's Thumb blog and referred to in Dr. Musgrave's post we reproduce here) have very pointedly repudiated specific errors in Behe's position.
Then something very unusual happened: having found himself in a corner and facing the choice either to stubbornly continue refusing to admit his mistakes, thus damaging his already seriously damaged reputation even further, or finally admit that the "mere grad student" and "a woman" bested him, Behe made a step in right direction. He admitted that he was wrong.
While this may serve to partially repair Behe's standing in the scientific community, this must be just the first step. To recover the respect of scientists (rather than of ID advocates) Dr. Behe should finally respond to many other critical comments to his pro-ID work, and admit his numerous errors pointed out by a number of critics. One example is the critique (by Mark Perakh) of Behe's treatment of probabilities and complexity (see Irreducible Contradiction and Beyond suboptimality) which Behe has not responded to for eight years.
The above story shows a possible reason for Behe's ignoring critique such as that by Perakh: if he likewise simply ignored Abbie's posts, he would not face the hard choice between admitting his error and defending an indefensible position. For a scientist with so many years of work behind him, 35 scientific publications is not a very impressive record. Now Dr. Behe has an opportunity to respond finally to critique such as that by Perakh, to admit that his treatment of probabilities and complexity was inadequate, and return to a biochemical lab for a real research instead of writing books aimed at gaining a cheap popularity among the general population and acclaim by the ID crowd. That is the only way he may recover a respectable standing in the scientific community.

In 2004 William Dembski disseminated an article wherein he introduced an allegedly novel measure of information he dubbed "Variational information." This measure was in fact not a novel
quantity but rather a well known (for over forty years) "Rényi divergence of the 2nd order." When his flop was pointed out, Dembski added to his article a reference to Rényi. However, the amended version of Dembski's article contained statements which showed that Dembski not only was not familiar with the widely known and heavily referenced work of Rényi, but did not grasp its essence even after it was pointed out to him. In the three years after the amended version of Dembski's article was posted, Dembski has kept that version posted without any signs of having a second thought. This allows one to think that no self-correction from Dembski is forthcoming. These facts seem to support the opinion of Dembski as being, in the words of Professor Shallit, a "pseudo-mathematician". I
similarly suggested that his mathematical exercises are "quasi-mathematics." Contrary
to Dembski's claims, it in no way can serve as a "mathematical foundation of Intelligent Design." Although in the opinion of ID advocates it contains innovative and useful stuff, all that
is "innovative" there is usually useless, while all that is useful there has usually been known for a long time.

On a few occasions Dembski lamented that his critics are usually not mathematicians and hence are not really qualified to debate his
mathematical exercise. Recently two professional mathematicians - Olle Häggström and Peter Olofsson, both highly qualified experts in math statistics and related fields, published essays showing serious faults in Dembski's mathematical output. Dembski and Marks responded with an article where they attempted to refute Olle's arguments. While some replies to Dembski and Marks have already been posted, a reply from Olle himself was expected. I am glad to inform TR visitors that Olle's reply to Dembski and Marks has appeared at http://www.math.chalmers.se/~olleh/reply_to_Dembski.pdf.
I think Olle succeeded admirably to reveal the emptiness of Dembski-Marks's arguments.

The information measures introduced in a draft
manuscript by Marks and Dembski are briefly discussed. It is pointed out that it is not clear which questions the new information measures
are capable of answering and that other measures with clearer meaning and significance have already been introduced in older work. Because Marks and Dembski appeal to the MaxEnt principle to justify a uniform probability distribution and compare their work the NFL results, it is also pointed out that the latter imply that search/optimization is very easy.

This brief essay comments on the essay by Olle Häggström critical of Dembski’s misuse of the No Free Lunch theorems, as well as on the article by William Dembski of a Baptist seminary and Robert Marks of the Baylor University, who denied the validity of Häggström's arguments, and, also on Tom English’s view of the concept of "Active Information" promoted by Dembski and Marks as a possible replacement for Dembski's failed concept of Complex Specified Information (CSI).

One of the most common accusations against "Darwinism" and evolutionary theory, as a whole,
is that they lead to the devaluation of human life such as was dramatically manifested in the Nazi Holocaust. Such a notion is embodied in Richard Weikart's From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004). Avalos demonstrates, however, that all of the major ideological precursors of the Holocaust have a long religious history that pre-dates Darwin. We can find such precursors in the work of Martin Luther and among biblical authors. Furthermore, Avalos demonstrates that creationists constitute the most vocal defenders of genocide and infanticide from ancient times to the present day. Therefore, the claim that theistic creationist ethics minimize or eliminate the devaluation of human life is false.

Professor Coyne published a review of Michael Behe’s new book, titled The Edge of Evolution. Behe responded on an Amazon blog. Here is Professor Coyne’s rebuttal of Behe’s response.
As could be expected, Behe's "response" to Coyne's critique is typical of Behe's supercilious style, wherein he does not shy away from a self-gratifying delusion regarding his fiasco as an expert witness at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Board of Education trial. Professor Coyne, in his brief response, shows the abject failure of Behe both in his new book and in his "response" to critics.

The new book by Michael Behe, titled The Edge of Evolution, has already been shown by a large number of reviewers to be a senseless and arrogant monstrosity having nothing to do with science. (See, for example, reviews by Mark Chu-Carrol and Sean Carroll on this site). No wonder, after Behe's laughable performance at the Dover trial, that his credibility, not very high even before the trial, dropped to an infinitesimally low level. Among multiple reviews dissecting Behe's absurd "arguments," the review by Professor Jerry Coyne stands out as a very clear and brilliantly substantiated autopsy of Behe's piffle.

As Mark Chu-Carroll has shown in a recent post, Michael Behe's new book revealed his lack of understanding of mathematics, which he tried to apply to prove the alleged "limits of evolution." In this review, published in the Science magazine, biologist Sean Carroll shows that Behe's understanding of evolution is not much better than of mathematics. The inevitable conclusion is that Behe's new book is just senseless piffle (although ID advocates most certainly will try acclaim it as mortal blow to evolution theory; it is not by a long shot). (Off-site link.)

This is a review of a new book by Michael Behe. The book has not yet been officially released, but editorial advertising material already acclaims it as a "bombshell." For those familiar with Behe's output, and especially with his fiasco as a witness at the Dover trial, such acclaims sounded very doubtful. Mathematician Mark Chu-Carroll, who had access to a review copy, offers an analysis of Behe's egregiously sloppy "mathematical arguments" against evolution's power to produce the variety of biological forms. Chu-Carroll shows that the "bombshell" promised by advertising outlets will not materialize because Behe's argumentation is plainly incorrect, revealing Behe's lack of understanding of the material he endeavored to write about. Of course this is what could be expected after Behe's clownish appearance at the Dover trial. (Off-site link.)

Our readers will hardly be surprised to learn from this post that William Dembski has once again demonstrated his lack of understanding of some elementary concepts of evolutionary theory; this time it was the case of experimentally shown feedback in the evolutionary process. Those of our readers who are familiar with Mark Perakh's critique of Dembski's literary output may recall that Perakh, in his essays and his book Unintelligent Design pointed to the absence of any account of feedbacks as one of the serious weaknesses of Dembski's fruitless "explanatory filter." A discussion of this essay can be seen at The Panda's Thumb blog.

This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifiable, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.

This is an exceptionally clear, brief explanation by Professor PZ Myers of the episode in the history of the developmental biology. The once popular but later discarded theory by influential biologist Ernst Haeckel, suggested in the second half of the 19th century (the so called theory of recapitulation, or the "biogenetic law"), was abandoned because this theory didn't fit the facts. PZ Myers's narration is eminently comprehensible even for readers without any background in biology or related disciplines. Besides providing an unbiased explanation of that episode, Myers's essay also shows that the presentation of that subject by ID advocates (notably by J. Wells) is false, one of the worst cases of shameless distortion of facts in the service of ID's anti-evolution propaganda goals.

Pim van Meurs offers a discussion of the way seismologists distinguish between nuclear explosions and earthquakes and shows that the inference to an explosion is made in a way completely different from the "design inference" suggested by Dembski, the latter being a futile invention with no practical or theoretical utility. Discussion of this essay can be seen at the Panda's Thumb weblog.

The three authors of this essay provide a well substantiated analysis of intelligent design as an alleged alternative to mainstream science and discuss a number of problem related to the attempts to make it a part of the curriculum in science classes. (Off site link. PDF format.)

William Demsbki's "explanatory filter" is a proposed method to infer intelligent design in nature. While it has been criticized from many points of view, there seems to have not yet been a comprehensive treatment within the framework of mathematical statistics. In this article mathematician Peter Olofsson, who is a renowned probability/statistics
theorist, argues that even if many of Dembski's assumptions are accepted, the filter still runs into serious trouble when it comes to biological applications. (PDF format)

Computer scientist/mathematician Mark Chu-Carroll adds his voice to
debunking, in quite unequivocal terms, William Dembski's pseudo-mathematics,
specifically Dembski's egregious misinterpretation of the algorithmic
information theory of Kolmogorov/Chaitin and Dembski's pseudo-definitions of
specification. It is a fine addition to previous publications dealing with
Dembski's mathematical exercises, many of which were posted on Talk Reason
(such as essays by Elsberry & Shallit, by Perakh [here (1), here(2), here(3), here(4), here(5), here(6)] and others).

In a letter of July 11 one of our readers suggested that we post critique of a recent anti-evolution article by George Gilder. In our reply,we pointed to Steve Reuland's post on the Panda's Thumb weblog wherein Gilder's article is critically dissected as one of the worst examples of anti-evolution gobbledygook. Here is another
article (by John Derbyshire) revealing, from a different angle, the absence of substance in Gilder's screed.

The original NFL theorem and rugged fitness landscapes are briefly reviewed and it is pointed out that the assumptions behind the former lead to the latter type of fitness landscape. Furthermore, it is stressed that for these fitness landscapes, the absolute performance of evolution is not prohibitively bad, that high-fitness regions tend to be well-connected, and that the difficulty of finding high-fitness regions does not increase with the size of the search space. (PDF format.)

The points in question include the distinction between "targeted" and "targetless" search algorithms, the merits and shortcomings of Dawkins's evolutionary algorithms, Dembski's misuse of the No Free Lunch theorems, his contrived "displacement problem," etc.

Many points discussed in this chapter have also been briefly addressed in Perakh's essay published in Skeptic magazine (vol. 11, No 4, 2005). The text of the essay is also available online. Moreover, the NFL theorems and critique of their misuse by Dembski has been discussed before on this site.

It has to be pointed out that the discussion of Dembski's "displacement problem" in WIDF and in the essay in Skeptic only covers the initial version of that "problem" as it was rendered by Dembski in his No Free Lunch book. More recently, Dembski had modified the "displacement problem," and this newer rendition naturally was not yet discussed either in chapter 11 of WIDF or in the essay in Skeptic. The new version of that "problem" has been though briefly addressed in this essay.

The Intelligent Design (ID) movement proposes that it is possible to detect whether something has been designed by inspecting it, assessing whether it might have been produced by either necessity or chance alone, and, if the answer is negative, concluding it must have been designed. This means there is no need to make any commitments about the nature of the designer.

This approach relies heavily on the concept of specification. The proponents of ID have made various attempts to define specification. A recent attempt is in a paper written by William Dembski in 2005 which is clearly intended to supersede previous attempts. This essay examines this revised definition of specification and highlights some issues in Dembski's paper. It also proposes that our intuitive understanding of when an outcome is implausible is much better explained by a comparison of the likelihoods of different hypotheses. Finally the essay considers some of Dembski's objections to the comparison of likelihoods and Bayesian approaches in general.

In this article eight co-authors argue against intelligent design pseudo-science and call all scientists to take an active role in the fight against that pernicious attack upon science. (Off-site link.)

This essay by Mark Perakh has been available since 2003 on his personal website. Some parts of it have also been included in Perakh's book Unitelligent Design (Prometheus Books, 2004). However, as the posting of Lenny Flank's essay shows, the notions discussed in Mark Perakh's article of 2003 continue to invoke interest and debate. Therefore we decided to complement Lenny Flank's essay by re-posting Mark Perakh's piece of 2003 as an earlier, rather detailed exploration of a related topic.

IDers often whine that science unfairly rules out supernatural explanations or hypotheses. However, science does no such thing -- it simply insists that any supernatural hypotheses be put through the same scientific method that any other scientific hypothesis has to be put through -- and IDers are quite unable to do so.

Intelligent Design proponents claim that we can deduce that some living and non-living systems have been designed simply by inspecting those systems.
Mark Frank, a freelance science writer and philosophy graduate, argues that we assess whether something has been designed in the same way we assess any other cause, and this requires assessing who the designer is and how the designer has implemented the design.

Professor Bottaro demonstrates the amazing unsubstantiated self-assurance and lack of logic in Michael Behe's response to Judge Jones's ruling in the Kitzmiller vs DASD case. While Behe's testimony at that trial was clearly a devastating debacle for Behe, he seems to be under the delusion that he was very successful and is pleased with his own performance, despite his utter failure to convince the judge and scores of observers. This is a sad picture of a man who used to be a decent scientist but converted into a stubborn self-delusional defender of pseudo-science. Discussion of this essay can be seen at the Panda's Thumb blog.

Professor PZ Myers points to the most recent modifications in the position of some leading advocates of ID pseudo-science. These modifications seem to be attempts to salvage the sinking ship of ID by admitting certain scientific concepts they have routinely rejected until now. A discussion of this essay can be seen at the Panda's Thumb blog.

Casey Luskin is a founder of the so-called IDEA Club, which is a set of university campus groups active in supporting the ID pseudo-science. A lawyer by education, Luskin has recently joined the Discovery Institute, where he has become one of their most frequently heard voices. In this post Pim van Meurs shows the abject lack of substance in one of Luskin's latest essays.

This essay is a broad review of the evolution vs. creationism controversy, with emphasis on the legal aspects regarding teaching ID in science classes of public schools, but also discussing the question of whether ID is science (in author's view, it is not). It provides a succinct but rather complete review of the USA courts' decisions, preceding the most recent Kitzmiller vs DASD case, regarding the inclusion of ID and of older forms of creationism into school curricula.

Although Talk
Reason supports most of Lofaso's notions, there are, in our view, certain minor deficiencies in that essay. Readers who wish to get deeper into this matter may look up the following articles, where the relevant points are elucidated:
(1) Wexler, "Intelligent Design and the First Amendment: A Response," 83 Washington University Law Quarterly (forthcoming).(2) Wexler, "Darwin, Design, and Disestablishment: Teaching the Evolution
Controversy in Public Schools," 56 Vanderbilt Law Review 749 (2003).
(3) Wexler, "Of Pandas, People, and the First Amendment: The Constitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design in the Public Schools," 49
Stanford Law Review 439 (1997).
(4) Brauer, Forrest, and Gey, "Is it science yet? Intelligent design creationism and the Constitution," 83:1 Washington University Law Quarterly
(2005). (1Mb PDF.)

Intelligent Design (ID) proponents often refer to the SETI project as allegedly using a methodology analogous to their search for signs of Intelligence in the universe in general and in the biosphere in particular. They point out that the SETI project has been enjoying support from the scientific community (which is true) and therefore ID must be construed as legitimate as well. In particular, William Dembski has been persistently using such an argument in his ceaseless attempts to confer legitimacy upon his discourse aimed at "proving" that ID is a real scientific theory deserving serious consideration. On this site several contributors (Elsberry, Edis, Perakh, Shallit, and others) have debunked Dembski's numerous publications, including his pseudo-mathematics, and including his use of the SETI example. However, until now the SETI institute's staff has been staying away from the discussion of the alleged similarity of their methodology to ID's approach. In this essay, Seth Shostak of the SETI institute starts from the standpoint of the legitimate SETI approach and shows the lack of substantiation in ID advocates' comparison of their notions to the actual contents of the SETI project. In fact, SETI methodology has nothing in common with the ID advocates' fallacious approach and in a certain sense is contrary to it. (Off-site link.)

The central issue under debate is whether "intelligent design" is, in fact,
a genuine scientific theory or merely a disguised form of religious advocacy--creationism in camouflage. Its advertising to the contrary
notwithstanding, "intelligent design" is inherently a quest for the supernatural. No matter how fervently its salesmen wish "intelligent design" to be viewed as cutting-edge science, there is no disguising its true
character. It is nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on science, and should be rejected as such. (Off-site link.)

This is the text of the expert report by Professor Jeffrey Shallit ,who was supposed to be a "rebuttal witness" for the plaintiff at the Kitzmiller vs. DASD trial. Shallit's rebuttal was meant to address the testimony of William Dembski. However, Dembski was withdrawn as an expert witness, so Shallit's rebuttal was automatically withdrawn as well. The details of the story have been discussed on the Panda's Thumb blog (for example, in Matzke's entries). (Off-site link, 1.26 MB PDF)

Renowned mathematician and author of popular books on "innumeracy," John Allen Paulos, points to the inconsistency of ID advocates who argue against the natural origin of biological organisms while at the same time accepting the absence of a "guiding hand" in the country's economical system. (Off-site link.)

This essay points to some of the contradictory statements by Behe in his testimony at the Kitzmiller vs. DASD trial. Of course, readers already familiar with Behe's lack of logic and consistency (so vividly exemplified by such his statements as that [a] ID is
"focusing exclusively on the mechanism of intelligent design," but [b] ID is "not specifying any mechanism for intelligent design," and [c] that both statements are "completely consistent" -- see the transcripts of the trial, day 10) will not be surprised by other examples discussed by Pim van Meurs. A discussion of this essay is found on the Panda's Thumb blog, (thread 1602 of October 24).

This is the "State of the University" speech by the president of Cornell University, Hunter Rawlings III. This head of one of the best universities in the world argues, in an eloquent and impartial way, against intellgent design and for faculty's active involvement in repudiating it as a junk science. (Off-site link.)

Intelligent Design advocates frequently state that living things are too complex to have evolved. This article shows how Claude Shannon's information measure has been used as a well-regarded proxy for 'complexity' to predict the information that is required for a genetic control system to operate. This measure is called Rfrequency because it is computed from the frequency of binding sites in the genome for proteins that do the genetic control. Using information theory, we can also precisely measure the information in DNA sequences at the binding sites, a measure that is called Rsequence. In nature we observe that Rsequence is close to Rfrequency, which implies that Rsequence must have evolved towards Rfrequency. A model that you can run on your computer demonstrates this evolution, starting from no pattern in the binding sites and ending with the two measures being equal within the noise of the measurement. The amount of information evolved in the model is far more than the Intelligent Design claim can withstand. Given 2 billion years for evolution on this planet there was plenty of time to evolve the observed complexity. The article is based on a paper published in the scientific literature in 2000. A web site accompanies the paper, giving many more details about the computer model and how to run it.

This essay by Dr. Wesley Elsberry was dated 1996 (with an update of 2000) but it sounds as if written about the most recent claims by leading
advocates of intelligent design who seem to be unable to offer any arguments which have not been circulated and shown to be unsubstantiated many times before. In particular, from Elsberry's essay it becomes evident that many recent utterances of leading ID advocates sound like almost-verbatim reproductions of arguments by Wilder-Smith (1970) and of even older notions
by Shutzenberger. Elsberry offers a logical analysis of those anti-evolution arguments and reveals their inadequacy.

"Intelligent Design" (ID) creationism largely relies on long-discredited forms of argument to try and make a case against naturalistic evolution. However, it also includes some novel elements, such as William Dembski's claim to rigorously identify a reliable signature of intelligent design and thereby establish ID as an independent form of explanation not reducible to "chance and necessity." Such arguments also fail; indeed, intelligence itself appears to be a product of combinations of chance and necessity, where Darwinian processes are critically important in producing genuine novelty. Addressing the scientific mistakes of ID creationism requires attention to current science about intelligence, complexity, and information; it must be a collaborative effort between biologists, physicists, computer scientists and others.

Writing for the Discovery Institute, Casey Luskin has dissed evolutionary research performed using the Avida research platform. As the author of this essay wrote last year, computer models employing evolutionary mechanisms are a thorn (or maybe a dagger?) in the side of ID creationists. The models allow testing evolutionary predictions that in "real" life would take decades to accomplish or are impractical to run in wet lab or field. They also allow close control of relevant variables -- mutation rates, kinds of mutations, the topography of the fitness landscape, and a number of others, enabling parametric studies of the effects of those variables on evolutionary dynamics. A number of publications using Avida (see here and here) have established that it is a valuable complement to wet lab and field studies in doing research on evolutionary processes.

An extensive discussion of this article can be seen on the (Panda's Thumb weblog in the thread titled Desperately Dissing Avida, dated September 30, 2005.

This essay, posted by MSNBC, offers a brief explanation of the difference between intelligent design "theory," which lacks explanatory power, and evolution theory, which provides reasonable explanations for an enormous multitude of observed facts. In particular, the author of this essay (addressed to readers with little or no knowledge of the subject) shows the fallaciousness of the two favorite arguments by ID advocates - that based on Behe's concept of Irreducible complexity and that based on Dembski's concept of complex specified information. Quoting Provine, the author of this essay concludes that Intelligent Design "would become the death of science if it became a part of science." (Off-site link.)

This is a reply to two comments, posted to one of the ID-promoting websites, whose authors tried to (unsuccessfully) rebut certain points in Mark Perakh's essay published in Skeptic magazine (v.11, No 4, 2005). The text of Perakh's essay is available online.

The Privileged Planet, authored by Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer, and Jay W. Richards, a theologian, is a new version of arguments that were already well-developed by the time of Cicero in the first century BCE. This essay compares some of the specific arguments in The Privileged Planet to those of Cicero, William Paley, and Philip Mauro, an author of the famous Fundamentals, and shows why those arguments for Intelligent Design were as flawed then as they are now.

Pim van Meurs quotes an excellent article by congressman Rush Holt, whose opinion is that "intelligent design" is a meaningless concept which is "not even wrong." It is nice to discover that even some politicians (regrettably not too many) may possess not only skills useful to be elected, but also intelligence and common sense.

In this essay three professors from George Mason University provide an analysis of various theories about the origin of life and the origin of the variety of life forms, and argue against teaching ID in public school science classes. (Off-site link.)

The Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University, where Michael Behe is a professor, ackowledges his right to express his views but unanimously and unequivocally rejects his pro-ID position. (Off-site link.)

The author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, one of the best known books at the time preceding the emergence of the Discovery Institute-based ID movement, offers in this brief article a succinct rebuttal of the pro-ID arguments. (Off-site link.)

In June 2004, Stephen Meyer, a Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, published a review article in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. With its publication, intelligent design creationists believed they had finally achieved the long sought after "Grail", a peer-reviewed article in a bona fide scientific journal. However, the particular circumstances of the article's publication, its official denunciation by the Biological Society of Washington, and a critical critique by members of the scientific community,turned intelligent design's "golden chalice" into a Tupperware cup. (Reprinted with permission from Skeptic Magazine Vol. 11, Number 4, pp. 66-69.)

In this essay the literary editor of The New Republic magazine, Leon Wieseltier, argues against the philosophical legitimacy of the Intelligent Design conceptual system. (Off-site link; free registration may be required.)

In this essay Dr. Musgrave shows the lack of substantiation in Dembski's assertion regarding a recent publication of a paper by Schwartz et al. wherein its authors suggest certain concepts connecting the working of brain with some aspects of quantum physics. The essay is accompanied by a discussion on the Panda's Thumb weblog.

This brief essay argues that the ID conceptual system derives from sources entirely unrelated to the eliminative (negative) logic presented to support it. ID advocates adhere to their concepts, not because these concept have a strong logical foundation, but mainly because these concepts seem to be tuned to their preconceived religious predilections. While the beliefs are surely sincere, the logic derives from the belief, and not vice versa, as often represented as the essence of intelligent design.

In this essay, the author suggests that creationists have singled out evolutionary biology for denial for no objective reasons, as similar (usually fallacious) arguments can be suggested against any other science. As an example, Matzke disusses meteorology, whose concepts are plainly contrary to the Bible's many assertions of God directly causing meteorological phenomena such as rains, floods, and the like. Matzke suggests reasons for creationists's leaving meteorology alone while feverishly assaulting evolutionary biology. This essay has invoked an inordinately prolonged and heated discussion (several hundreds comments posted to the thread on Pandas's Thumb weblog). (Off-site link)

In this brief essay Sanjai Tripathi, a graduate student in microbiology, has expressed his view of the "intelligent design vs. evolutionary biology" clash. As long as there are students who think so clearly and who are capable of presenting the pro-evolution argument in such a succinct and logical way, there are sufficient grounds to look at the future with optimism and expect that the nonsense propagated by the ID advocates will ultimately wind up in the dustbin of history, joining there all previous pseudo-scientific drivel like Blondlot's N-rays, the theory of phlogiston, and the like. (Off-site link)

William Dembski and Michael Ruse have recently co-edited a book, Debating Design, exploring current ideas concerning evolution and divine design. Much of the book is devoted to ID or to ID-lite ideas, and has been criticized for reinforcing any impression among non-scientists that ID is a scientifically serious notion. Another book which has attracted attention due to its pop-ID ideas is Gerald Schroeder's The Hidden Face of God, since it impressed ex-atheist Antony Flew during his conversion process. Taner Edis reviews both books, arguing that scientists should become more active, not relying on philosophers and liberal theologians to keep ID out of science education.

Comment: Mark Perakh's critique of Schroeder's publications, mentioned in Edis's review, can be seen at www.talkreason.org/articles/schroeder.cfm, as well as in Perakh's book Unintelligent Design (Prometheus Books 2004), or in The Skeptic (Australia), vol. 23, no 4, 2003.

Intelligent Design advocates like to complain that they are done an injustice when they are referred to as "Intelligent Design Creationists". They would like to obscure that fact that the flavor of creationism characterized by an emphasis on Intelligent Design is simply a less specific and less honest derivative of "Scientific Creationism". However, the major players in the movement are heavily weighted towards theologians, and the symbols the movement uses are not-so-subtle icons from Christianity.
For the extensive discussion of this essay, see the Panda's Thumb blog.

In this essay Mark Perakh briefly reviews a recent article by William Dembski and shows that, contrary to Dembski's claims, it cannot serve as part of the mathematical foundation of intelligent design. Among several serious faults of Demsbki's paper is his view of biological evolution as a search for a small target in a large search space. In fact, biological evolution is not searching for a target. Probabilities calculated by Dembski, for example, for "finding" a specific protein in the space of all possible proteins of a given length are irrelevant because evolution is not "searching" for a predetermined specific protein. Likewise, Dembski's "displacement problem" (which in his new article is in fact not identical to the problem of the same name as rendered by Dembski in his earlier publications) is equally irrelevant for evolution, since the latter conducts no target-oriented searches.

Michael Behe's concept of the irreducible complexity (IC) of molecular assemblies in biological cells has been touted by intelligent design (ID) advocates as allegedly strong evidence for ID. In fact, a concept identical in all but name with Behe's IC has been around for a long time before Behe. Professional biologists have overwhelmingly rejected Behe's notion as contrary to the evidence, showing that irreducibly complex molecular systems could have evolved via "Darwinian" evolutionary path with a high likelihood. In this essay Mark Perakh approaches the problem from an angle different from that utilized by biologists. He argues that the notion according to which IC implies ID is contrary to logic. IC systems, by definition, are unreliable, so if they are designed, this points to an inept designer. Perakh further argues that in this case we deal not just with the problem of suboptimal design but with a case where the putative designer delberately designed systems in a way making them easily vulnerable to accidental damage. Perakh concludes that if biological systems are indeed IC this more reasonably can be construed as an argument against inteligent design.

In this essay Wesley R. Elsberry discusses Popper's "demarcation criterion" of falsifiability as the necessary property of a real scientific theory, distinguishing it from an unfalsifiable non-scientific conjecture. Elsberry shows that Popper's criterion has been seriously misinterpreted and misapplied in the publications of William Dembski, such as his recent book The Design Revolution. While serious deficiencies of Dembski's book have been revealed in other critical discussions (as, for example in Desperately Evading the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design: A Review of Dembski's The Design Revolution and The design revolution?), this essay sheds light upon one more weakness of Dembski's acclaimed discourse.

In this essay Pim van Meurs provides an extensive (although not yet exhaustive) list of organizations and experts in various fields of science who strongly support evolution theory and reject intelligent design's crank science. The sheer size of this list, which exceeds immensely those lists of scientists (often including non-scientists) who doubt or deny evolution theory and are incessantly acclaimed by intelligent design advocates shows the complete lack of foundation to the claims that "growing number" of scientists are abandoning evolutionary biology. In fact only a miniscule minority of scientists doubt evolutionary theory, a lively field where discussions of tenets are the order of the day but where the principal ideas of Darwinian biology are considered firmly and reliably established on a par with other scientific theories like quantum mechanics or theory of gravitation. It also shows that the hopes of the intelligent design creationists for the imminent "design revolution" are built on sand. Intelligent design creationism may continue to generate a lot of noise outside science, but as an alleged alternative to "naturalistic science" it is most probably doomed to wind up in the dustbin of history along with other fads and fallacies of pseudo-science.

In this article Bradley Monton suggests an argument against William Dembski's design inference, based on the concept of the universe being spatially infinite. This type of argument relates to Dembski's "Universal Probability Bound'' (UPB) of approximately 10^(-150). Monton argues that the value of the UPB suggested by Dembski contradicts the recent scientific data according to which the universe is most likely flat and therefore spatially infinite. This means that "probabilistic resources," which Dembski takes to be limited by the maximum number of possible inrteractions of particles during the universe's existence since the big bang, in fact are immensely larger thus invalidating the significance of Dembski's UPB and with it his entire argument in favor of intelligent design. (PDF format)

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0346934. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This is a review of the recently published anthology titled Why Intelligent Design Fails (Rutgers University Press, 2004, editors Matt Young and Taner Edis). The reviewer, Professor Paul R. Gross, gives the contributors to this anthology a high mark for their detailed dissection of the fad referred to as Intelligent Design. It convincingly shows the scientific emptiness of Intelligent Design, this conclusion based on a painstaking analysis of the intelligent design concepts from a purely scientific vantage point.

In this brief essay, Mark Perakh addresses the recent appearance of a paper by William Dembski, wherein this author suggested an allegedly novel measure of information. As Cosma Shalizi and David Wilson, experts in the pertinent field, have demonstrated, in fact Demsbki's paper contains no novel math (in Dembski's own words, he has reinvented the wheel) but seems to contain certain mathematical errors and therefore hardly represents anything of value. Dembski's paper is supposed to be the first installment in a set of seven papers under the common title Mathematical Foundation of Intelligent Design. If the entire set will continue the trend started in its first installment, the planned foundation will not only fail to support an edifice of a reasonable theory, but more realistically may be expected to collapse under its own weight.
Comment on September 12, 2004. This essay contains a link to Dembski's article. We have found that this link no longer opens Dembski's article in question (there is instead a message that the article will be re-posted when ist author is confident that he has "worked out all kinks"). The amended version of Dembski's article is, however, available online.

"This book is a readable and devastating scientific analysis of
intelligent design creationism. . . .unlike ID's proponents, these authors
have done the real science that deflates the claims of intelligent design.
Their work deserves the respect of everyone with a say in what is taught in public school science classes."
-- Barbara Forrest, co-author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design

"A terrific book that explores, fairly and openly, whether proponents of ID have any scientifically valid gadgets in their toolbox at all. . .
.accessibly written throughout and an invaluable aid to teachers and
scientists."
-- Kevin Padian, Professor and Curator, University of California, Berkeley,
and President, National Center for Science Education

"'Intelligent-design theory' makes extravagant claims, but refuses to
come up with even a small fraction of the evidence needed to sustain them.
Why Intelligent Design Fails brings together clear and devastating arguments by true scientists, which will convince perceptive and fair-minded readers that 'intelligent design' belongs to the history of propaganda, not to the achievements of science."
-- Norman Levitt, Author of Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

Is Darwinian evolution established fact, or a dogma ready to be overtaken
by the next scientific revolution? Today, a comparatively sophisticated
group of Darwin-deniers have coalesced in the "intelligent-design" movement,
arguing that the molecular machines in cells cannot be assembled by natural
selection, and that the information in our universe cannot be generated by
mindless processes. They have even claimed to detect design in complex
structures by rigorous mathematical means.

In Why Intelligent Design Fails, a team of scientists call on
their expertise in physics, biology, computer science, and archaeology to
examine intelligent design. They take design claims at face value, without
attempting to rule out the hypothesis of a designed universe just because of
its supernatural overtones. They consistently find grandiose claims with no scientific merit. The questions intelligent-design advocates raise have
largely already been answered, or else mainstream scientists have been
making excellent progress on them with a Darwinian, naturalistic approach.

After an overview of intelligent design and its intellectual context, Why Intelligent Design Fails moves on to biological claims concerning common
descent, and the arguments of Michael Behe. Contributors show how the notion
of "irreducible complexity" does not challenge Darwinian evolution,
explaining how mainstream science comfortably accounts for examples of
biochemistry, bacterial flagella, and bird wings.

Intelligent-design advocates, however, have ambitions beyond overturning Darwinian thinking in biology. So the authors examine the information-based arguments of William Dembski. They discuss thermodynamics and self-organization, the ways human design is actually identified in fields
such as forensic archaeology, how real complexity theory thoroughly
undermines Dembski's notions, how research in machine intelligence indicates that intelligence itself is the product of chance and necessity, and the misunderstandings of the no-free-lunch theorems propagated by Dembski. The book closes with an investigation of cosmological fine-tuning arguments said to show that the universe was designed for humans, and reflections on the place of the intelligent-design movement at the fringes of mainstream science.

Intelligent design turns out to be a complete scientific mistake, but
also a useful contrast highlighting the amazing power of Darwinian thinking
and the wonder of a world filled with complexity without design.

In this article science writer Carl Zimmer discusses cancerous tumors from
the viewpoint of their complexity. He demonstrates that such tumors
meet the requirements set up by Behe's, Dembski's and their cohorts'
definitions of the so-called Irreducible Complexity and, therefore,
according to Intelligent Design conceptual set must have been deliberately
designed. This leads beyond the justification for suboptimal design offered
by intelligent design advocates and, if ID's concepts were accepted, would
point to a designer who has wilfully and deliberately created cancerous
tumors possesing an intricate system enabling cancerous cells to
successfully win the competition against normal cells and avoid all the
protective mechanisms of an organism. While concentrating on such examples
of alleged irreducible complexity as bacterial flagellum, ID advocates avoid
discussing such examples as cancerous tumors. Despite the feeble attempts by
ID advocates to eschew the question of who the designer is, from their
statements to sympathetic audiences it is unequivocally clear that designer
they have in mind is the God of the Bible. This explains why an example
meeting their definition of irreducible complexity such as cancerous tumors
is never mentioned in their books and articles - it would pose a very
uncomfortable problem for them of explaining why has their beloved designer
created such a terrible product, so skillfully killing and torturing his
beloved people. Therefore a much more reasonable explanation is that
cancerous tumors (and bacterial flagella as well) are products of evolution
via a Darwinian path.

A book titled Unintelligent Design by Mark Perakh is now available from the Amazon.com online bookstore ($22.40 plus SH) and is expected to be available in bookstores shortly. Here is the editorial review:From the Inside Flap
Spurred on not only by the quasi-scientific agenda of the so-called intelligent design theorists, who seek to prove the existence of God mathematically, but also by his personal contact with otherwise rational scientists, physicist Mark Perakh sets out to reveal the falsity of the claims of neocreationism with a thorough, carefully detailed series of arguments aimed at the very heart of those who would see evolutionary theory discarded. Perakh strips away the reader-unfriendly "mathematizing" present in the neocreationist theses in order to reveal their flawed logic and their meaninglessness.
His work is divided into three parts: first, an attack on the specifics of intelligent design, a theory spearheaded by the writings of William Dembski (THE DESIGN INFERENCE, INTELLIGENT DESIGN, NO FREE LUNCH), Michael Behe (DARWIN'S BLACK BOX), and Phillip Johnson (DARWIN ON TRIAL, THE WEDGE OF TRUTH, DEFEATING DARWINISM BY OPENING MINDS); second, a critical dismantling of several arguments closely related to the intelligent design movement, such as attempts to "harmonize" the Bible with modern scientific understanding of the universe, the anthropic principle, and nonrandom evolution; and finally, a discussion of proper scientific method and probability theory, as well as an infamous account of science gone bad for the sake of religion--the Bible code theory propagated by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg.
This thoughtful and incisive critique from a veteran scientist genuinely concerned about the integrity of the scientific enterprise wastes no diplomacy on those who would see its purpose twisted to ideological ends. Perakh successfully ties his opponents' arguments together by demonstrating how most of them are based on the same mistaken view of probability theory and the same disregard for impartial objectivity in testing hypotheses. This is a must-read for anyone interested in separating scientific facts from religion masquerading as science. About the Author
Mark Perakh is professor emeritus of physics at California State University, Fullerton. A native of the Soviet Union, he taught and conducted research in Israel, Germany, and England before coming to the United States. Perakh has published four books and nearly three hundred scientific articles, and has received a number of prizes for his work, including one from the Royal Society of London.

In this article biologist Wesley Elsberry and mathematician/computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit critique William Dembski's notion of "specified
complexity", also known as "complex specified information".
A non-expert will find in this article a clear explanation of various mathematical and non-mathematical concepts which are necessary to
evaluate Dembski's ideas --- ideas that are frequently draped in a quasi-mathematical mantle under which there is little content.
Elsberry and Shallit provide an expert analysis of serious faults in Dembski's claims, demonstrating that in many respects his arguments
cannot be sustained. (PDF format)

The reason why antievolutionists can't be taken seriously is not because of religion (though intractable religious motivations certainly play a role in the creation/evolution debate) but because their arguments rest on a congenitally flawed core methodology. A recent illustration of this behavioral pathology concerns several Fellows of the Discovery Institute (David Berlinski and Phillip Johnson) and how they have approached technical issues. Peeling back this methodological "black box" reveals an often-hilarious mismatch between the scientific pretensions of the current Intelligent Design movement and the threadbare character of their underlying documentation. It also reveals a troubling double standard in how Design advocates criticize Darwinism compared to the way they coddle fellow-traveler creationists and their suspect baggage.

In this essay the essence of the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems by Wolpert and Macready is briefly explained without using mathematical symbolism. It is shown that William Dembski's assertion of Darwinian evolution allegedly being prohibited by the NFL theorems is based on his misapplication of these theorems to the specific fitness landscapes. These theorems are in fact applicable only to the algorithms' performance averaged over all possible fitness landscapes. They do not at all prohibit the advantage of evolutionary algorithms over random sampling if applied to specific fitness functions that arise naturally in the biosphere. Also Allen Orr's critique of Dembski's position is briefly analyzed. Orr's arguments are slightly corrected and clarified.

In this article, David Wolpert, a mathematician renowned for proving (together with William Macready) the so-called No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems, debunks William Dembski's use of the NFL theorems in Dembski's attempt to show that "the specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence" and that therefore the Darwinian evolution theory is allegedly wrong. Wolpert points to the lack of substance in Dembski's discourse, thus supporting the claims of other critics of Dembski's misuse of the NFL theorems (including those posted on this site - see M. Perakh, A Free Lunch in the Mousetrap.

The neocreationists Michael Behe and William Dembski base much of their thinking on analogies: Behe sees a mousetrap as an analogy for irreducibly complex biological structures, which (he says) could not possibly have evolved gradually. Dembski posits an archer shooting at a lone target on a vast wall. If the archer hits the target, we infer design or intention. The archer is an analogy for nature, and hitting the target is an analogy for design. This article reveals the flaws in Behe's and Dembski's analogies and thereby in their entire arguments. Specifically, Behe is mistaken if he thinks that the mousetrap, which cannot evolve on its own, is a fair analogy for an organism. The mousetrap is, in any case, not irreducibly complex. Demsbki overlooks the possibility that the universe may support a vast number of archers shooting at a vast number of targets. Complex organisms may be improbable on a specific planet, but they may be very probable in the universe as a whole. But Dembski concentrates on the one target that was hit by one archer on one of possibly many attempts. (PDF format)

This paper argues that the strongest formulation of the design argument for the existence of God takes the form of a likelihood argument. The argument asserts that some observation (e.g., the adaptive complexity of the vertebrate eye) is more probable on the hypothesis that the eye was created by an intelligent designer than it is according to some other hypothesis (e.g., that the eye was created by chance or that it was the result of the process of evolution by natural selection). This argument, if successful, would not demonstrate that an intelligent designer exists, nor even that such a state of affairs is probable. Rather, the likelihood argument has more modest contention -- it merely seeks to show that the evidence favors one hypothesis over the other. I argue that the Achilles heel of this argument is that it is impossible to assess how probable it is that the vertebrate eye should have the features it does, according to the design hypothesis, unless one has independent information about what the putative designer's goals and intentions are. The article also discusses the logic of anthropic reasoning, also within the framework of likelihood considerations, and considers how observation selection effects are to be represented probabilistically. (PDF format)

This paper defends two theses about probabilistic reasoning. First, although modus ponens has a probabilistic analog, modus tollens does not -- the fact that a hypothesis says that an observation is very improbable does not entail that the hypothesis is improbable. Second, the evidence relation is essentially comparative; with respect to hypotheses that confer probabilities on observation statements but do not entail them, an observation O may favor one hypothesis H1 over another hypothesis H2, but O cannot be said to confirm or disconfirm H1 without such relativization. These points have serious consequences for the Intelligent Design movement. Even if evolutionary theory entailed that various complex adaptations are very improbable, that would neither disconfirm the theory nor support the hypothesis of intelligent design. For either of these conclusions to follow, an additional question must be answered: With respect to the adaptive features that evolutionary theory allegedly says are very improbable, what is their probability of arising if they were produced by intelligent design? This crucial question has not been addressed by the ID movement. (PDF format)

Intelligent Design is the name used by the latest attempt to incorporate teleological explanations as part of science. The claim is made that scientific data cannot be understood naturally but require the additional element of purpose, divine or otherwise. The intelligent design movement is a kind of stealth creationism, creationism by another name. Several elements of intelligent design are identified and reviewed, listed by primary reference sources of each notion. (PDF format)

This essay is intended for those readers who are interested in verifying whether or not Dembski's alleged "Law of Conservation of Information" is valid from a formally mathematical viewpoint. It is designed to translate Dembski's claims into a more formal mathematical language. The power of formal mathematics is that it often makes unjustified conclusions obvious. In this essay certain unjustified steps are identified in the arguments that Dembski suggested as supposedly leading to his so-called "Law of Conservation of Information." While the essay is posted here in the PDF format, LaTeX, DVI, and PostScript formats are also available.

In this article a detailed review of The Design Theory suggested by William A. Dembski is offered. Two books and three papers by Dembski are criticized. The conclusion is that Dembski's acclaimed theory is inconsistent and logically deficient. Since Dembski is often referred to as one of the leaders of the "intelligent design movement", and his work is praised as the most rigorous foundation of the design theory, revealing weaknesses and inconsistencies in his discourse touches the very core of the "intelligent design" concept. In that article also Dembski's interpretations of probability theory, complexity theory and information theory are critically discussed.

In this item, the immensely popular book by a biochemist M. J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box, is critically dissected, revealing, among other things, the irreducible contradiction between Behe's assertions and some mathematical facts, thus depriving Behe's argumentation of evidentiary value.

This article offers a critical review of several books and papers by Phillip E. Johnson, a lawyer who, as he has himself asserted, "assumed the leading role" in the "intelligent design theory". As this review demonstrates, Johnson is a dilettante in many questions he endeavored to discuss, including biology and especially information theory. His literary production does not seem to deserve the attention it has attracted.

A critique of the book No Free Lunch by Intelligent Design proponent William Dembski. This critique shows that Dembski's case is nothing more than a god-of-the-gaps argument dressed up in misleading pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo.

This essay explores William Dembski's concepts of "apparent specified complexity" and "actual specified complexity." Dembski's "explanatory filter"/"design inference" is incapable of distinguishing between the two.

This is a variant of the review of William Dembski's "The Design Inference" published in Reports of the National Center for Science Education in 1999. The inability of Dembski's "explanatory filter"/ "design inference" to distinguish between the products of natural selection and intelligent agency is discussed here.

This critiques an essay by William Dembski on the issues of optimality and sub-optimality. Within it, Dembski's unfamiliarity with the relevant biological terminology and errors in dealing with sub-optimality arguments are explored.

One attempt to rescue William Dembski's concepts of "apparent specified complexity" and "actual specified complexity" is to label a process as the proxy of an intelligent agent acting at one or more steps removed. This essay explores the implications of "intelligent agency by proxy," concluding that the concept leads only to a weak argument for Deism.

This is a partial critical review of a new book by William Dembski titled No Free Lunch - Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence. According to this review, Dembski's new book suffers from many shortcomings similar to those found in Dembski's earlier publications and in some respects even exaggerates them. Some points in that book are obviously erroneous, for example the calculation of "complexity" of individual English words. The alleged Fourth Law of thermodynamics suggested by Dembski, is an unsubstantiated statement which cannot be taken seriously. Some other selected points in the reviewed book are also subjected to strong critique. The overall conclusion is that Dembski's new book is a largely useless exercise in a quasi-scientific disguise.